I've been following Dave Winer's work on his outliner, the OPML Editor for sometime now, just reading what he says on his blog about it, getting interested, but never really getting involved because it only runs on Windows or Mac and I have neither at the moment.
For me outlining is a great way of thinking structurally. It mirrors mind-mapping. In the bad old days when I had to spend an awful lot of time writing Powerpoint presentations, I would always start with drawing a mind-map by hand, transfer that to the outline view in PPT and then fill in the gaps. It fits well with the way I think.
At the beginning of the year, I gave myself a weekend to learn how to set up a server on EC2 following Dave's "EC2 for Poets" howto. I was really pleased to get something up and running but the main purpose of it was to learn something new, I didn't have any particular end in mind other than just getting it running. Of course it came with a free gift inside! I now had a Windows machine (albeit one running in the cloud) with the OPML Editor installed as standard.
So I poked around in it and created some outlines. One of the things I wanted to do was to replicate Dave's use of the World Outline to create an online repository of Worknotes, but again, it seemed that meant I needed to get a desktop OPML editor working.
At the same time, I've been getting increasingly dissatisfied with the "appification" of my web experience. My microblogging is through Twitter and Twitter and I clearly have different ideas of what the service is about. My blogging has been through posterous, which has worked well and continues to work well for now, but then came the news that posterous was being acquired by Twitter and, well, that sounds like the end of posterous as a useful tool for me. Google Reader stopped being an optimal feed reading experience for me some time ago and the trajectory seems to be that things can only get worse (more vertically integrated and tied to Google Plus) And as for Flickr, oh Flickr I loved you once but then you ran off with those Yahoo!s and now you don't play nicely any more. In addition, I have a whole bunch of stuff on Libsyn, YouTube, Vimeo blah blah blah, to say nothing of my filched archive of old seesmic videos…
All in all, it's time to get back to owning my little corner of the internet again. I've learned a lot about how I like to think and work, what I like to do, how things get shared, but the bottom line is that I don't trust these corporations with my data. Now that wouldn't be a problem if it was just data, the thing is that what I call "my data" is also a very important component of all of my personal, social and working relationships and if I trust any corporation with those, I'm just being naive and careless – in the end those relationships will suffer in ways that I can't predict.
I also saw recently how much stuff that I've created on the web is just gone, or difficult to find or retrieve. I want to create my own archive in a form that means stuff can be found, re-used and remixed rather than it all being spread everywhere and kept or deleted at the whim of platform owners.
In the last few weeks some things have come together. Firstly I saw Dave and Adam Curry were doing a podcast again. This has to be a good thing. I had a listen, but they seemed to be straight into what sounded like deep detail. I had no idea what was going on, but I listened through to the first one and was convinced that there was something going on here. It felt very much like the second half of 2004 when podcasting was starting – and I knew from that experience that there probably wasn't that much to learn to get to grips with what they were talking about, but that I needed to get the software working so that I could really experience it.
Then I saw Adam talk about installing the editor under wine1.3 on Ubuntu and despite my nose wrinkling at the prospect of using wine, when I tried it myself, it worked very well (there's a cosmetic glitch where a couple of the menus are repeated in the menubar, but it works and it doesn't fall over)
I poked around enough to get a World Outline server running on my EC2 server, but I was struggling (still am) to understand the whole thing. What's the solution? Don't try to understand the *whole* thing, just understand the bit that you're looking at now and trust that the rest will become clear. After an afternoon of mucking around, I finally understood what a root was in the context of the World Outline and to see the effects of changing the nodetype. From here it was easy to get to the point where I could create my own worknotes site, (almost) just like the big boys. Of course just as I'd worked it out for myself, Adam published a screencast basically recapping everything that I'd learned that day. I could have waited and not had so much brainache, but I really think I wouldn't have learned as much from just being told how to do it.
With this under my belt, I felt prepared to go back and listen to the podcasts. And I just listened to all six of them this weekend, pretty much back to back. And what was completely over my head the first time, was now starting to make some sense. I felt braver about poking around and started to understand what's amazing about all of this: everything's an outline. Of course the content of a blogpost is an outline, but so is the code that creates each page, the css is an outline, the code that creates the system pages that let you set preferences and parameters are all stored in outlines. And so everything can be (is!) edited, customised and configured using the editor itself. This is open-source with a twist, you really can look under the bonnet and see how it works, while it's working. I think this is really cool.
I also think that right now is a great time to get involved, it's mature enough to have something that works, but it's still shaky enough to feel like you're really able to contribute. The mailing list feels like it's just moved to the next stage.
I'm going to be having a go at using the various tools in the suite to cover off blogging, micro-blogging, my feed-reader and narrating my work. There's more, but I think this will be enough for now.
Oh, just to see how it worked and to beef up my editing skills, this afternoon, I reformatted my #llobo reflections from last year as an online outline. It was very easy to do – see what you think.Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous
When did “x is a thing” become, y’know, a thing?
OK, so my head is full of cold but I thought I could wander out into Twitter and ask something that was puzzling me, but it seems I might have asked it at the wrong time or the wrong place. I got back answers that made me think people didn't understand the question.
So there's a formulation that I've seen on Twitter and blogs that is: "X is a thing now" or "is X a thing? Really?". I suppose I've internally translated it as meaning "X is a meme now". Except that the formulation seems to have become a meme itself. And that's what I was trying to ask – when (where/how etc.) did saying that "X is a thing" which means that X has become a meme, become a meme?
Also what effect does capitalising "Thing" have? What's the difference (if any) between "We could make that a thing!" and "We could make that a Thing!"?
PS I'm not just asking the question because I want to know. I'm also interested in how you *can* answer questions like this. It's not something you can search for easily, nor does it seem to show up on Quora… yet.
Impromptu cinema at #brewcamp – #socialobjects abound!
I went along to #brewcamp last night in Walsall. It was lovely, I got to hear about the amazing open spaces and wildlife in and around Walsall from Morgan Bowers and Mark Blackstock's story of growing a local aggregator which confirming that people come back to places that send them away.
As this was a local government focused group (although it nicely blurs the boundaries with lots of others involved) I took along a copy of Local Government to show. Thinking about it this morning, I realised how much of the success of the evening was down to mediation through social objects.
Social Object #1 – The event itself: #brewcamp was inspired by #teacamp which in turn came out of Jeremy Gould's experience of attending #tuttle – which demonstrates the self-propagating nature of social objects (people experience one and think "I could do that") and the inheritance of properties (the mix of non-alcoholic beverages, chat and informal learning).
Social Object #2 – the venue – Starbucks helps people connect, whether it's in agreement or disagreement over the standard of the coffee, it also provides some familiarity through consistent branding and decoration, though of course I chose to subvert that later on. It's important to recognise that different people connect differently through a social object. Social Object owners often think/wish they can control or heavily influence what that connection is. Nuh-huh. I have to also say that the baristas in that store were great, helpful, they stayed open late specially for us *and* allowed me to hack the space.
Social Object #3 – talks without powerpoint – taking away the visual aid forces the talk and the talkers to be the social object rather than the bullet-points on the wall – speech on its own seems to be a more conductive social object than speech+visual aid.
Social Object #4 – the film – is the obvious one, I wrote a bit about what I'm trying to do here. We're well practiced in watching a film and talking (before, during and) after it. What I also noticed was what people tweeted about it while it was showing and the pictures that turned up on twitter and how the conversation drifted on afterwards.
Social Object #5 – the projector – I've borrowed the Time/Image pico projector to do this. A few people were just interested in the kit. It's a PK301 from Optoma and costs about £250. It's not the cheapest but it works really well and simply and it really is not much bigger than a couple of iPhones strapped together.
Social Object #6 – hacking the space – the act of appropriating a bit of a Starbucks, getting them to turn some of the lights off and turning it into a pop-up cinema is a social object in itself. It's not just the film that people have gone away talking about, it's the thing I did, the combination of it all, the idea of showing a movie to a small group of people that isn't about booking a big cinema and isn't about having people crowd around a computer screen. It's one I want to repeat over and over. I love doing it and look forward to seeing how it'll work in other places.
Social Object #7 – curry afterwards – how can you do an event in the West Midlands without it?
Can you see any more?
On the road again
I'm unfixing my abode and going up to Birmingham and its environs for a few days, I have some potential for retreat in Oxfordshire later in the month and I'm cat-sitting in Wood Green in a couple of weeks (oh the glamour!) but otherwise freewheeling.
I'm always up for chats, tea, coffee, idling etc. I love talking at length to an audience about what I do, also ask about underground archive film screenings and face-to-face work.
The way it works is you need to nab my time, don't wait for me to be coming near you. If you call, I will come (AM&OSKE*). Maybe not immediately and sometimes more quickly if you wave a wad of notes under my nose or can sort travel and accommodation expenses, but really, say now and we'll pencil something in.
(*Axe-murderers and other serial killers excluded, sorry)
Indestructable! #allofme
This. Over and over and over.
Knowing that I would be a grown-up in the 21st Century was very exciting. The jury's still out on how exciting it actually is. However I think if it's more exciting it's going to be for different reasons than I'd thought.
I doubt that we're going to find that Martian Mysterons actually have a base on our Moon and that we'll be at inter-planetary war with them by 2067 and I hope not to be proved wrong.
Oh to be indestructable. Oh to be able to do the most dangerous of things, to shoot guns, to climb up to the tallest of tall buildings and to slip and fall and still be OK. Oh to live and work in Cloudbase. Oh to hang out with girl pilots called the Angels. Oh to sound a bit like Cary Grant.
emergence-y
"Well, we just show up every day and let it emerge, encourage things we like, let things we don't like just die away."
"So how can I help you keep doing the same thing but design some elements to make it even better?"
"Well you'd have to show up every day and encourage the things you like and let the things you don't like just die away."
"Yeah, but what's the process we could use?"
"Um… 1. Show up every day. 2. Encourage the things you like. 3. Let the things you don't like just die away."
"Well in my 30 years of corporate experience that hasn't worked"
*sigh*
Allan Jones sings #allofme
This is the sort of scene that made me want to be able to sing well. I loved to hear guys like Allan Jones who made this big voice while singing soft songs – the link is that he got started in a couple of Marx brothers films, much of my childhood Sunday afternoons involved soaking up black and white movies. Girls loved this stuff. If you want women to fall madly in love with you (and of course you do), then learn to sing. And let them drive you around in a car, while they wear ridiculous headgear and your voice cuts through the fact that you're in a open-top sports car while singing the soppiest of songs. And they grin at you and you've got it made. That's the message I took anyway.
Also there was always a snigger in our house because my father's best man was called Alan Jones (with one 'l') so y'know "ha ha it's Alan Jones!".
Didn't know till I looked him up that he was Jack Jones's father.
PS I could have sworn I did an audioboo of this song at some point in the last couple of years, but I can't find it anywhere… boo.
Groucho and Chico discuss contracts #allofme
http:///www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS2khYJZKwA
Do you remember your first ROFL? yeah, me too, it was this. Hysterical.
I'm giggling even now and I haven't watched it for two or three days.
These guys gave me a love of punnage and clever use of language. Also a deep suspicion of lawyers and anyone who wants you to sign a piece of paper before they'll let you do something.
public/private space and the web
Re-reading that bit from the Space Hijackers that I pointed to in the previous post, I kept coming back to this:
"If you’re a local council, selling off land to private developers is an easy way to raise capital. But the undermining of social liberties that comes with these sales is unprecedented. Take the construction of the Olympic village in Stratford for example. It’s an entirely privately owned complex. Although there will be public space, shops and entertainment, there will also be robotic CCTV drones monitoring everyone coming and going – thousands of cameras watching your every move, a ban on begging, busking, skateboarding, hoodies, public assembly, protest, loitering and much much more. Everything that makes our city so vibrant is drained out of the space and replaced with a 2D image of a city. Unless you're shopping you're not welcome."
and how the same thing is happening to the web, the privatisation of *our* data, the recording of our exhaust trails, the move from a place where conversation happens and interesting things are born to being just another passive, entertainment and shopping channel.
Public Private (work)Space Enclosure Culture Stuff #workplaceblogs
I was loitering around MORE London the other day and was struck by the contrast in foyer space between Ernst & Young and pwc. (Btw yes pwc is PricewaterhouseCoopers ie PwC but their new logo doesn't reflect the idiosyncratic capitalisation that we know and love them for. I do hope it's not on the way out, it seems to be alive and well in copy across their site)
Anyway, this is what I saw (they're only short…):
and
oh and then I went round the corner and shot this of the "front" of pwc:
Now I should point out that what I was doing here is very very naughty indeed. MORE London is private property and both loitering and photography are among many things that are severely frowned upon. However, I'm a wild-eyed rebel at heart (as y'know) and I just don't care!
The first one is Ernst & Young – it's too short really to get a feel, but basically it looks more like a media company with big screens pouring INFORMATION out all over you as you sit in reception waiting to see your tax accountant.
Over the street, is pwc.
Well it's not really a street is it? It's a private paved thoroughfare leading from Tooley Street to City Hall. The mayor's testicle is at one end, so what does that make The Shard? Oh and it has a little miniaturised (and highly sanitised) open sewer running along the middle of it to remind you of the history of the Thames. Now I think about it though, I think the water's running away from the river, I'll have to go back and check, but that would be no good, a sewer that ran *into* the populated areas? yikes!
Anyway, back to the offices. When I've walked past before now, I didn't realise that the downstairs bit of pwc was corporate space at all, it's just rows of sofas like you might find in a hotel lobby. The slightly brighter though warm lighting is the clue though. This isn't a place to slop and read a book or have a quiet cup of tea, it's a place where Work goes on, just the gentler, cosier, friendlier Work than the bright bright white-light WORK that goes on in the little rooms on the first floor just above.
What's going on here? Is the firm saying "Look at us, we know how to work hard and work soft!" "We're not grey heartless accountants, we can kick back and relax on comfy chairs with the best of them – and we're not afraid of you seeing that, in fact we're going to make it the first thing you see when you get out of your cab and walk round to see us." "But don't worry, we do work really really hard, we do serious stuff, wearing suits, with whiteboards and flipcharts and everything, upstairs". Or what?
And what does it feel like to work in a place like this? What's it like to have meetings in these areas? What's it like to talk? Is it always this empty (this was just before 5.30 on a Thursday so I guess most "meeting" work would be over by then, everyone's back at their desk e-mailing madly before the pub).
Overall, I'm interested in whether the inspiration for this comes from "new ways of working" thinking or "new ways of marketing" – is it about the staff or the image? I'm coming down on the side of it being a shop window, but if so, what are they really selling?
Oh and can someone please find me some Evil Empire music to go with the last clip (probably with some crows cawing, maidens screaming and maniacal evil laughter in the background)
Perfect Path 
